Category Archives: Fun Stuff

Scotland Notes

Beinn: is the most common Gaelic word for “mountain”

Coffee americano: (black coffee with 2 shots of espresso)

Chips: French Fries

Dinnae: Don’t.  My grandmother and people in the church where I grew up said this all the time.  “A dinnae ken” which means “I don’t know”.

Haggis: Haggis is a savoury pudding containing sheep’s pluck (heart, liver and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, traditionally encased in the animal’s stomach though now often in an artificial casing instead. According to the 2001 English edition of the Larousse Gastronomique: “Although its description is not immediately appealing, haggis has an excellent nutty texture and delicious savoury flavour”.

We have my grandmother’s old cookbook with recipes for haggis, lights, sweetbreads (don’t ask), blood pudding… I never could have made it in the olden days!

We also saw haggis pizza, haggis flavored chips, frozen haggis…  We tried none of that.

I was going to put a picture but I couldn’t stomach it (NO pun intended!)

Loch en Eilein:  Simply – loch means lake.  Eilein means island.  So, there’s an island in the lake 🙂

Place suffixes:

-more:

-ness:  a promontory or headland.  Loch Ness is a lake with a promontory

-shire: Roughly “county of”  Inverness-shire; Perthshire

-strath: a wide river valley, a stretch of relatively flat, fertile land bounded by hills.  Strathspey is the River Spey and the valley around it.

 

Interesting place names:

  • Crook of Devon:  The name derives from the sudden angle (crook) which the River Devon makes near the village. A village within the parish of Fossoway in Perthshire. It is located about 6 miles southwest of Kinross on the A977 road. Until relatively recently the official name of the village was Fossoway (as evidenced on the war memorial etc.) but this has been usurped by the widely used nickname “crook of devon”.
  • Drumnadrochit: It derives from the Scottish Gaelic ‘druim na drochaid’ meaning the ‘Ridge of the Bridge’.
  • Firth of Forth: (Scottish Gaelic: Linne Foirthe) is the estuary or firth of Scotland’s River Forth, where it flows into the North Sea, between Fife to the north and Lothian to the south. It was known as Bodotria in Roman times.
  • Inverfarigaig: (Scottish Gaelic: Inbhir Farragaig) is a hamlet at the mouth of the River Farigaig, on the south-east shore of Loch Ness in Inverness-shire, Scottish Highlands and is in the Scottish council area of Highland.
  • Kingdom of Fife: (Scottish Gaelic: Fìobha) is a council area and historic county of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries to Perth and Kinross and Clackmannanshire. By custom it is widely held to have been one of the major Pictish kingdoms, known as Fib, and is still commonly known as the Kingdom of Fife within Scotland.
  • Killiecrankie.  I have no idea how it got this name.  It sounds sort of like you want to kill the crank but that can’t be right.
    Killiecrankie (Gaelic: Coille Chreithnich) is a village in Perth and Kinross, Scotland on the River Garry.
  • Loch Faskally: (Scottish Gaelic: Loch Faschoille is a man-made reservoir in Perth and Kinross, Scotland, 2.5 kilometres (1.6 mi) northwest of Pitlochry.

Playlist of all my Scotland videos plus others of interest:

 

 

A Travel Funny for Today

I'm Already Falling Behind

 

I got this from a Facebook post and don’t know if any of it is true but these are sure funny 🙂

UPDATE:  A bit more digging reveals the source is http://www.wanderlust.co.uk/magazine/news/20-astonishing-holiday-complaints-thomas-cook-abta

 

THESE ARE ACTUAL COMPLAINTS RECEIVED BY “THOMAS COOK VACATIONS” FROM DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS:

 

1. “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”

2. “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time – this should be banned.”

3. “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food at all.”

4. “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels.”

5. A tourist at a top African Game Lodge over looking a water hole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel “inadequate”.

6. A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she’d been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.

7. “The beach was too sandy.”

8. “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure.Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white.”

9. A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.

10. “Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women.”

11. “We bought ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses for five Euros from a street trader, only to find out they were fake.”

12. “No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled.”

13. “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England it only took the Americans three hours to get home.”

14. “I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends’ three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller..”

15. “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the accommodation’. We’re trainee hairdressers – will we be OK staying there?”

16. “There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners now live abroad.”

17. “We had to queue outside with no air conditioning.”

18. “It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel.”

19. “I was bitten by a mosquito, no-one said they could bite.”

20. “My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”

 

Travel editor Peter Greenberg solves traveler disputes and offers tips on how to travel smartly this holiday season.

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